Felicia Day “You’re Never Weird on the Internet” – Review

The first time I saw Felicia Day on TV, it was as one of the mostly forgettable ‘potential’ Slayers in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The most memorable part of the role, for me, was that at one point Dawn, Buffy’s sister, thought that she was a potential Slayer, but it turned out to be Felicia’s character instead. I had to look up the name of Felicia’s character on her Wikipedia page. It’s Vi, in case you were wondering.

The next time I saw Felicia in something, it was as Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Let me get a few things out into the open here. I’m happily married, have two kids, and consider myself too old to have celebrity crushes anymore. I’ve been around long enough to know that celebrities are people with their own sets of problems and imperfections, and that most of the time it’s the roles they portray on TV/movies that we like the most. That is to say, rarely do we know anything real about them as people.

With that said, I’ve had a celebrity crush on Felicia Day ever since I first watch Dr. Horrible. She seemed like the kind of girl that I would have been friends with back in High School.

It wasn’t long until I discovered The Guild, the webseries that she created, which also seemed to confirm my suspicions that we would have been great friends if we had known each other when we were younger. She’s smart, loves video games, AND she’s cute?!? What are the odds?

Felicia’s memoir, titled You’re Never Weird on the Internet, was released last week. Happily, it fits perfectly into the very small intersection of books that I like to read, and books that my wife likes to read. I’m almost exclusively a fantasy or science fiction novel guy, but am generally willing to read anything that is sufficiently nerdy. My wife will read pretty much any biography or memoir because she loves stories about people. So we’re having a great time reading it together.

But my fantasy that Felicia and I would have been friends if we had met when we were younger was dashed pretty early on. Just from the fact that her childhood would have made meeting her to begin with so unlikely…and then her family moved so much that maintaining the friendship would probably have been unlikely.

So I’ll just have to content myself with being a fan, and this book only serves to increase how much I appreciate Felicia as a fan. The humor and openness of her writing while discussing her childhood, education, mistakes, and overall nerdiness is amazing. She’s particularly candid about her own missteps along the way, yet accepting of the fact that ultimately both the good and bad decisions are what led her to where she is now as the media-annointed “Queen of the Nerds”.

Sadly for my sense of fandom, she doesn’t do as much TV work anymore. She’s supposedly ‘busy’ with running Geek and Sundry, and all that entails. What a crock. Though I suppose that’s forgivable given that Tabletop has introduced me to a number of extremely fun games since it started running.

Sorry, back to the book. If you enjoy any of the things that Felicia Day has created or participated in over the years (and if you’re on this site and reading this article, I have a strong suspicion that you do), you owe it to yourself to pick up this book. It’s funny. It’s insightful. And it’s a great read.